have a lumia 830...dos boots, but doesnt load the mouse touch screen driver so when i get to c prompt i cant type anythīng! if only i can access the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to see why its not loading the driver...sigh.

you have it backwards. The 5.25" disks had the holes in the middle, and the 3.5" disks had the hard-shell with sliding door.

edit:

nm, after re-reading I understand what you mean. Both are "floppy" disks as the "floppy" refers to the magnetic medium (the flexible plastic disk enclosed in the sleeve/shell) as opposed to a "hard" disk in which the magnetic medium was a metal disk.

What I loved about DOS is doing work on a keyboard instead of using a mouse. The software I use for data entry at work is horrible. I'm constantly fighting repititive stress injury because of the thousands of mouse clicks I do each week, and I have an ergonomic mouse. If just a few actions I do could be done on the keyboard instead it would save me pain, and actually be quicker.

In Ontario and new data management system has been put in place for the social assistance programs (Employment and Social Services) called SAMS from IBM (that cost the government something like $300 million). Given its complexity to get anything done over the DOS-era version, the joke is that it's missing a C in the name.

"MS DOS Mobile is easy to use...very often you will see the classic C: Drive prompt. Just type your command and our 8086 processor emulation will whirl into life."

"Today we launch MS DOS Mobile...a bold step forward...people said it couldn't be done....and questioned why it should be done...and they told us, we shouldn't do it...but you know what?...we dun it anyway..."

I don't think you could find a 3.5" disk in 1981, the year the IBM shipped its first PC. First computers to use them didn't come out for a few more years, with the Mac, in 1984, being the first major system to use that drive exclusively and so began shrink-wrapped software shipped on 3.5" disks. In 1981, if this were real, it would have been on 5.25", and much floppier. :-)

All of us techies love the nostalgia, and I hope like the history reminder (or lesson for those too young to remember this period). No downer here. I remember how excited I was when all of these technologies appeared on the market. Back then, these were far from mainstream and it was like being part of a special club to follow this stuff. Many people thought computers were a fad or only for business use. "What am I supposed to do with a 'personal' computer? Put my recipes on it? Sure, that sounds useful. These things will never catch on." The idea that the computers would ever be mass market devices, let alone that the consumer marketplace would be largely dominated by pocket sized computers that would also function as telephones was inconceivable.

When I was a little kid, I used to play on a neighbor's TRS-80, shortly before my mom bought the cutting edge Apple ][+ (that was before there was an IBM PC or an MS-DOS), later built my own no-name Apple //e clone that added lowercase letters (ha!), then went to the ill-fated, but technically impressive 16-bit //GS. But when Apple stopped upgrading the ][, // line, and didn't give its users a path to the Mac (they later offered the Mac LC, which could take an Apple 2 emulation card, but it only emulated the //e, not the more powerful GS and therefore much of my software library would have become useless anyway), I jumped over to the PC, at that time (~1991) with Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions (their first version to ship on a CD). At the time, it was mainly because of the games (very few games came out for the Mac, all of them came out for the PC).

Naw those disks were actually "floppy" compared to the 3.5's. Though bigger by X & Y, they were thinner and made of softer material. Always felt lighter to me. I did have a couple of packs of blank 5" floppys but were sold along with a large Commodore 64 kit of hardware & games about a year ago.

When I started playing with computers in the very early 90's, aged 13 or so, for the life of me I thought floppy disks were the 5.25" disks and hard disks were the 3.5" disks. I was embarrassed when I found out the truth -- until I realized that everyone I knew thought the same thing (including the sales guy working at Future Shop...and he should know, right? right?). Of course I then tended to expound quite vigorously about how anyone could ever get the terms wrong and lorded it over the ignorant... (I was an asshole as a teenager, is what I'm saying).

I was a Windows 95 beta tester. Every week a set of 3.5 inch floppies came for installation. My Packard Bell 486 Win 3.11 PC had both 5 inch (A drive) and a 3.5 inch (B drive) drives. I swapped out the 5 inch drive for a new-fangled CD ROM drive when Microsoft released Encarta. I never actually used the 5 inch drive because by late 1994, early 1995 everything had moved to the smaller, less fragile floppies.